Opinion Brief: Friday, March 11, 2016

Tonight’s Opinion Brief brought to you by the Humanitarian Coalition, working together to provide vital supplies such as water, food, blankets, shelter and medicine to Syrian refugees.
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Good evening, subscribers. In the few short months the Trudeau government has been in power, we’ve seen a flurry of activity on the climate change front — speeches, summits, bold words and high-minded sentiments. But the policy that many have offered up as the best hope for Canada to meet its emissions targets — the carbon tax — seems to be dead in the water after PM Trudeau’s recent meeting with premiers.

It’s not the end of the world, says former Kyoto Accord negotiator Chris McDermott. In fact, it might force Canada to drop the concept entirely and start working on the problem from other angles: through technology, and through directly capping emissions from the oilsands. “Canada needs to accept that oilsands product is more carbon-intensive than conventional crude and that gripes about ‘dirty oil’ are legitimate. It should therefore adopt a minimum standard requiring that oilsands emissions drop down to parity with conventional crude.”

And while we’re on the topic of blind alleys, here’s former oil industry exec Ross Belot explaining why B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s grand plans to use liquid natural gas (LNG) exports to wipe out the province’s debt are looking less plausible than ever. “Prices for LNG in Asia tumbled at the beginning of 2015 by 40 per cent, or $7 per million BTU, due to a supply/demand imbalance and the falling crude price. Unless the LNG companies were working on a very conservative pricing forecast, the economic argument behind B.C.’s LNG push has taken a painful hit.”

Donald Trump’s performance at Thursday’s GOP debate was clumsy, scattershot and — to borrow one of the man’s favourite putdowns — “low-energy”. What gives? Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle says it’s the consequence of a candidate offering a pre-election pivot to the sane centre and realizing — too late — that when he’s called upon to be sensible, he quickly runs out of things to say. “His closing statement, delivered in the same half-asleep voice, was probably his most electrifying moment of the evening: ‘So I just say embrace these millions of people that now for the first time ever love the Republican Party. And unify. Be smart and unify.’ Essentially: I broke your party. Now surrender.”